1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus capable of printing a variable print job, and a control method and a storage medium thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
The demand for variable data printing, in which data suited for the needs of each customer, is increasing. Since the customer data registered in a single job is printed by respective record unit, a variable data job (VDP job) includes a large number (e.g., several tens of thousands of records) of records in a single job. In a VDP job, a VDP object is associated with each record. A master output which will serve as a background is composited with the VDP object, and the resultant data is printed. Such a VDP job is managed by job unit even if a plurality of records are included.
However, since jobs including a large number of records are managed by job unit, cases occur in which the print processing cannot be efficiently performed. An example of this is when printing cannot be performed due to some kind of error occurring in a record included in the VDP job. Examples of errors that occur by record unit in the VDP job include a case in which the VDP object to be referenced by a predetermined record is not present in a designated reference destination, and a case in which a paper sheet designated by a predetermined record unit is not set in a sheet feed stage.
A conventional printing system has a suspend/promote function that, by job unit, allows printing to continue by suspending an unprintable job, and promoting the next executable job in the print queue. However, in this conventional function, when an error occurs by record unit included in the VDP job, the whole job in which the error occurred is suspended, and the following printable job is promoted.
Consequently, printing cannot be continued even if the record following the record in which the error has occurred is a printable record, which is inefficient. Further, a record, which has already been printed, becomes a print target during reprinting, so that unnecessary printing occurs.
In addition, a conventional printing system has an error skip function for skipping the printing of the page in which the error has occurred by page unit in a normal page description language (PDL) job, so that the remaining pages in the job can be printed. However, this error skip function operates by page unit. Therefore, this function is unsuitable for a case in which the respective records included in the VDP job are configured from a plurality of pages.
Thus, the conventional skip function which functions only by job unit or page unit is not optimal for VDP jobs having a plurality of records. Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-305119 discusses a method in which the accessibility of the VDP object to be used during VDP printing is checked in advance. If there is a VDP object that cannot be accessed, at that point the system notifies the operator and cancels the print processing.
However, in the method discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-305119, the whole job is cancelled when there is a VDP object that cannot be accessed. Therefore, because access is impossible when executing printing, although the whole job is prevented from being cancelled, a printable record cannot be printed, which is inefficient.